Development and application of an embedded computer system for CubeSats exemplified by the OPS-SAT space mission

Abstract

AbstractThe space industry is one of today’s major growth markets and a very interesting business sector for innovation, science, and technology. In the last century, the space industry has dramatically changed and undergone strong commercialization referred to as “New Space”. In addition to the commercialization, the concept of CubeSats has become well established in the market during the last decade. The European Space Agency (ESA) has acknowledged this trend and uses CubeSat nanosatellites for projects like the OPS-SAT mission. OPS-SAT uses state-of-the-art embedded systems for various tasks. These embedded systems are the key for the great mission success of OPS-SAT and provide outstanding computational power for various experiments conducted with the OPS-SAT flying laboratory. This paper describes the fundamental design of these embedded systems and discusses some of the related achievements during the OPS-SAT mission.